Karin Davie, detail (left panel), In Out In Out #1 & #2, 1992, oil on canvas. Collection of the artist.
Exhibitions
Karin Davie: Underworlds
Contemporary Feature and The Davies Foundation
Galleries
1 March - 29 April 2007
In this, her first Canadian solo exhibition, Karin Davie's breakthrough paintings of the early 1990s (from the In Out In Out series) were paired with new works (from the Chinatownblues series) to showcase core achievements of her work. Through astonishing, bravura paint handling, Davie achieves an improbable fusion of the cerebral and emotional, the metaphorical and performative, in which the seeping trace of bodily gesture is rendered in sinuous cables of paint. Davie's paintings were accompanied by a selection of performance photographs, offering a glimpse of the conceptual underpinnings of her work with its evocation of the perpetual tensions of stamina, evasion and voracious sensuality.
Karin Davie is a leading artist in the current wave of painting practices transforming the legacy of high modernism to capture the fluid dynamics of contemporary culture: this is abstraction for the 21st century. Born in Toronto, the artist is a graduate of Queen's University (BFA, 1987) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1989). Her work has been exhibited across North America and Europe, including a major retrospective presented at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo in 2006. Davie is represented in New York - where she lives and works - by Mary Boone Gallery.
On Thursday 22 March at 12:15 pm, Curator of Contemporary Art Jan Allen offered a tour of the exhibition as part of our Art Matters series.
Jan Allen